These materials are provided by the Supply Chain & Logistics Institute at the Georgia Institute of Technology. You are welcome to use them so long as the copyrights remain intact, credit for authorship is acknowledged, and nothing is resold at profit.

“Bird's Eye View”

A tool for visualizing warehouse activity

If you draw the layout of a warehouse within an MS Excel spreadsheet and label the storage locations, this program will color the map according to any table of data, such as historical frequency of visits. Figure 1 below is an example.

Figure 1: The darker storage locations were visited most frequently.

This can be used to display any location-based statistic, such as annual pick-lines, cubic volume of product removed, frequency of restock, weight of stored product, travel distance from shipping, etc.

Run it from here!

Please read the license and disclaimers, then click to launch the latest version via Java Webstart:

Note: Some firewall settings may prevent you from downloading the program.

If you are running the program for the first time, Java Web Start will download 4 program files totaling about 3MB. The next time you run the program Java Web Start will check for and download any upgrades before starting the program. If there have been no upgrades, the application will start immediately.

Need Java?

This program is written in Java so it runs on any brand computer and any operating system. If you do not already have Java installed, get the latest version of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) here:

How to use the program

Draw a map of the warehouse within a spreadsheet and label every section of rack/shelving with a unique address. Save the result in Excel-compatible format, such as this example. (You need do this only once.)
Prepare a location-based statistic that you want to see, such as pick-lines per section of rack/shelving. This should be formatted as a tab-delimited text file with each line containing the unique address of one section of rack/shelving, followed by a tab, followed by the statistic of interest, such as this example, that lists the number of picks at each location during an interval of time.
Start the Bird's Eye View program and follow the three steps (load the data file, choose the color scheme, color and save the map).

Tips

The program colors a copy of your map. The spreadsheet that holds your warehouse map is not altered in any way and so can be used again later.
The program colors only cells that contain an address that matches one in the data file; everything else remains unchanged.
Be sure that the addresses of the rack/shelves are written exactly the same way in both the spreadsheet map and the data file. The program will treat “A-213-18” as a different address than “a-213-18”.
By adding distances to your warehouse map you can use a companion program Pickpath Optimizer to view individual customer orders projected onto the warehouse and measure travel times.

Remember that you can display any location-based statistic, such as convenience, as displayed in Figure 2.

Bird's Eye View of
convenient storage positions

Figure 2: The darker storage locations are closer to the workstations to which they are assigned and so are more convenient (courtesy of Nandor Schmaus).

If you make a very interesting map, please send us a copy!

You can find more information and tools like this in our textbook, at Warehouse & Distribution Science.

FAQ

Can I use some other spreadsheet program?: Yes, you can use any spreadsheet program that can read and write files in MS Excel 97 format. Every spreadsheet that I know of can do this, including the excellent and freely available open source tools gnumeric, Calc (the spreadsheet in Open Office), and KSpread (the spreadsheet in KOffice).
The program changed some of the formatting in cells that it shaded.: Yes, sometimes you may need to touch up the final result to ensure that attributes, such as alignment or orientation of text, are correct.
Why didn't you implement this using VB within MS Excel?: Because embedded macros in MS Office products are a rich source of viruses; because macros in MS Office can be excruciatingly slow; because MS Excel costs money and does not run on Linux and so some people do not have it. If these things do not bother you, here is an implementation within MS Excel.

Bird's Eye View of age
of product at each location

Figure 3: The shaded storage locations hold the oldest pallets and reveal how obsolete product is forcing increased travel.